[2] This text stated that all Conversos or individuals whose parents or grandparents had converted to Christianity may not hold public or private office and cannot testify in a court of law.
Although this was not an official law, many institutions in Toledo started to enforce the practice of blood purity tests and set the precedent on what it meant to be a true Christian.
[6] By the sixteenth century, the limpieza de sangre statutes coalesced to become a systematic effort to exclude conversos from offices in Church and state.
They multiplied rapidly due to strong support by cathedral chapters and the colegios mayores (senior colleges), a type of fraternity which included scholarships, tutorial services, and in some cases even chairs within the university structure.
[7] One example of how limpieza de sangre laws were applied is found in a legal brief composed on behalf of Pedro Francisco Molines concerning his betrothal to Maria Aguiló.
Many of the signatories are either friars or scholars of canon law, which demonstrates the staunch religious support the limpieza de sangre statutes found.
Tests of limpieza de sangre had begun to lose their utility by the 18th century; by then only rarely did persons have to endure the gruelling inquisitions into distant parentage through birth records.
For example, an edict of 8 March 1804 by King Ferdinand VII resolved that no knight of the military orders might wed without having a council vouch for the limpieza de sangre of his spouse.
[15] The discrimination was still present into the 20th century in some places such as Majorca, where no Xueta (descendants of the Majorcan conversos) priests were allowed to say Mass in a cathedral until the 1960s.
Nazi authorities requested lists of persons with Jewish ancestry, planning to deport them to camps as in France and Italy but the intervention of the bishop of Majorca Josep Miralles blocked their delivery.
The mixing of German and Italian troops with locals led some Palma women intending to marry foreign soldiers to obtain from the mayor Mateo Zaforteza Musoles certificates of not having Jewish ancestry.
Candidates for office and their spouses had to obtain a certificate of purity that proved that they had no Jewish or Muslim ancestors and in New Spain, proof of whiteness and absence of any in the lineage who had engaged in work with their hands.
[21] Additionally, as early as the sixteenth century, shortly after the Spanish colonization of the Americas was initiated, several regulations were enacted in the Laws of the Indies to prevent Jews and Muslims and their descendants from emigrating to and settling in the overseas colonies.
[23] The provisions banning emigration were repeatedly stressed in later editions of the Laws, which provides an indication that the regulations were often ignored,[24] most likely because colonial authorities at the time looked the other way as the skills of those immigrants were badly needed.
When Portugal successfully revolted in 1640 from Spain, the Holy Office of the Inquisition in both capitals initiated intensive investigations to identify and prosecute crypto-Jews, resulting in spectacular autos-da-fé in the mid-seventeenth century.
Only in 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, did the 29th General Congregation drop the requirement, but it still called for "cautions to be exercised before admitting a candidate about whom there is some doubt as to the character of his hereditary background.